Technology

Poke to the Future

Does Facebook spell the end of human interaction as we know it? Or is it just bad news for psychics, dating services, and women’s magazines? Henry Alford hopes some of Mark Zuckerberg’s romance-spotting superpower will rub off on the rest of us.

Deep, deep within the shadowed recesses of a Menlo Park conference room, Facebook executives are probably gazing into a crystal ball right this second and asking two questions of staggering importance to their livelihood: (1) How do we monetize without incurring any breaches of confidentiality or any of the lowered performance levels customarily connected to aging? (2) Why does it sound as if we’re talking about an older male prostitute?

But when it comes to determining Facebook’s future, the rest of us don’t need a crystal ball. We don’t need one because we know the site’s future is, for the most part, already here. Whether it be the Tunisnami or The Social Network or Betty White’s hosting Saturday Night Live or the raging popularity of Facebook-derived evidence at divorce trials, we’ve seen how the strangely bland yet strangely fascinating Web site can re-draw maps both global and local. It’s been reported that the world spends roughly eight billion minutes on Facebook daily; you never know where your own contribution to all this re-acquainting and social climbing and self-promoting will take you. I, for one, have become a curator of a tiny museum of ambiguous friendship. I collect funny women (Stupid Pet Tricks inventor Merrill Markoe; actresses Martha Plimpton and Sarah Thyre; *The New Yorker’*s Rebecca Mead and Nancy Franklin) and Greek priests (I have 124—it’s like a Vegas floor show devoted to the letter k).

It should be noted that the most prevalent prediction for Facebook’s impact on society is off base: many media critics, in bemoaning the site’s tendency to connect us with people who are geographically distant from us while disconnecting us from people who are right in front of us, have warned that Facebook will lead to a form of social alienation whose logical end is the breakup of the family. This is incorrect. The institution that Facebook is much more likely to render obsolete is community theater. Consider: us Facebookers love to meet after work or school; we’re desperate for an audience and need everyone to know exactly what we’re doing every second of the day; we trot out the same tired old “classics” season after season; we bring to the business of being “Liked” approximately 7,000 pounds of need; we spend an amount of time working on our bios that is wildly disproportionate to the amount of time anyone will spend reading them; we have a nerdier reputation than our actual insidery, dyspeptic worldview would seem to warrant; we participate in the phenomenon largely in an effort to stay in touch with our exes.

It might be best to approach the other sociological changes that Facebook is likely to bring about by first considering the changes it has already wrought. Take, for instance, conversational acuity. When you post something on Facebook, the number of written comments it provokes is a fairly reliable gauge of the comment’s keenness. Thus, if the site can be said to have produced any societal gain, it has helped people realize that the conversational gambit What I Have Recently Eaten is one that, on the whole, tends not to wow. Your recent tuna-fish sandwich is, alas, a nonstarter. Such a realization is huge—bigger perhaps than our country’s gradual divining in the 1940s that ventriloquism on the radio, conceptually speaking, sawed off the limb it was standing on.

Secondly, Facebook has taught us enthusiasts how to deal with envy. In the onslaught of photos and updates about our friends’ Turks and Caicos vacations and their sparklingly photogenic new babies and their second homes on remote islands off Maine, it’s easy for the less iridescent among us to feel suddenly homeless, penniless, and barren. We learn to smile indulgently or to comment satirically. Or some combination thereof: I grimace-smiled when a Facebook friend who’s a journalist airily posted last year that he was about to enjoy an expensive lunch with Ted Danson at the Four Seasons, but I literally cheered moments later when a friend of his commented that, quelle coincidence, she was just about to meet Rhea Perlman to eat shawarma in the Midtown Tunnel.

And what of the future? If, as these two examples suggest, the net effect of Facebook has been to make us savvier communicators, then that same movement is what we’re likely to see more of in the years to come. In David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, we learned that the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is able with 33 percent accuracy to predict which Facebookers will become romantically involved with other Facebookers simply by watching each party’s relationship status (i.e., “single,” “in a relationship,” or “it’s complicated”) as well as their on-site traffic. If, in 10 years, some of us 500 million Facebook users have spent as much time on the site as Zuckerberg currently has—please, reader, keep reading—then it’s possible that the more outwardly directed of us will develop this superpower as well. If so, the sociological ramifications will be significant. We’re likely to see the demise of psychics, introduction services, and all media aimed at women under 60. The word “yenta” will fall into disuse and be increasingly confused with a cross-dressing, Torah-reading Barbra Streisand.

A second future bit of social engineering will take an even more literal cue from Facebook. On the site, most friendship requests are sent unaccompanied by even the merest glimmer of a salutation or a personal note. People simply send their photo to you, bam, pas de plaisanterie. It’s easy to imagine this acutely American hyper-casualness gaining steam in our off-line lives. Indeed, in the off-line future, when someone who knows who you are but hasn’t been introduced to you runs into you at a party, he will wordlessly walk up to you and rub one side of his body up against yours in the manner of a dog pre-mealtime. Without offering any salutation in response (just like on Facebook), you can decide whether to accept or ignore this friendship request. To accept it, simply announce to your new friend what you have recently eaten.